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PotOnWheel
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| Posted 12/23/2009 11:52 PM (GMT -6) |   | |
http://www.oca.org/CHRIST-thoughts-article.asp?SID=6&ID=380
December 20, 2009 - Bulletin 6, Volume XLVII
Written by the Very Rev. Vladimir Berzonsky
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| "The Word became flesh and dwelt among us. We have seen His glory, the glory of the one and only Son, who came from the Father, full of grace and truth" (John 1:14) |
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Any mother holding her infant is an eye-catcher. The baby, not long having been within the woman, becomes a projection of self love, a reminder of the love that produced the fruit of her womb and her gratitude for the joy of holding evidence of her love for her husband, her gift to him and the fulfillment of maternal love in the new creature held in her arms -- an earthly reflection of the Holy Trinity.
In the icon of the holy Theotokos cradling in her arms the Son of God, the theology of the Holy Trinity expands to a greater level, because time and space enter as new factors in the process of our salvation. This unique birth is not the result of passion as we know it, but rather a timeless decision to redeem humanity by taking away the indelible sin of Adam, the impulsive act of defiance in Eden against the Lord. In that the first woman was a partner in the decision to heed Satan's suggestion, only a perfectly pure woman would have to be found to blot out Eve's transgression. Here is the reason for the glory and honor the Church pours out to the one selected, Mary the virgin of Nazareth.
But what man could be found to undo Adam's failure? None such on earth -- He would have to come from heaven. Even an angel would not do. Angels are heavenly beings of another order from mankind. None other than the only-begotten Son of God could erase the taint from the first sin that affected and infected humankind since Adam. So the Son of God entered time and space, yet He would need to be as totally human as He is in all ways divine. To be born in the conventional way as an act of human passion? Hardly. Still, He must be born of a woman; but in some way without the sexual act as we know it. Not an Extraterrestrial being as in contemporary fiction or from another galaxy. Such fantasies had been around centuries before the birth of Jesus Christ. He must come from a source beyond space and time.
The Father would send His unique Son to the pure virgin, and she would become pregnant without any conventional "help." For that reason the Father sent the Holy Spirit to her, but not without Mary's consent and her awareness of her role in the divine plan of the Holy Trinity for mankind's salvation. This profound mystery is before us in the icon of Mother and Child. It welcomes us to ponder so deep a theological truth in so ordinary a scene. The multitude and variety of icons depicting Christ in His mother's arms invite us to see with the eyes of the soul the eternal musings of St. Rublev's Holy Trinity icon, the Annunciation of Archangel Gabriel to Mary, the Nativity of Christ, and the glory of the Holy Spirit revealed in the face of the Christ child. Indeed, in all of this a contemplation of glory.
In some icons the face of our Lord Jesus is just below that of Mary as they gaze out together on the world now ripe for salvation. At the other extreme are the much-adored icons of "Tender Love," where their eyes are transfixed on one another with great compassion, reading each other's heart. Most others blend the relationship -- the Mother Mary looking upon Christ and He out at the world, or she with a foreboding half glance out at us, potential for danger, He all innocence, trusting in the safety of her arms, as in the famous Vladimir icon. Often she makes a throne of her left forearm and with the right pointing the Way and the Source of our salvation. |
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One Love
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| Posted 12/24/2009 8:43 AM (GMT -6) | | What kind of explicit view of time DOES one get from the Scriptures, Tom?
I. D. G. A. F.
Christ is All.
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One Love
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| Posted 12/24/2009 8:45 AM (GMT -6) | | Which of the options presented here most classifies your beliefs, Tom?
I. D. G. A. F.
Christ is All.
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One Love
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| Posted 12/24/2009 9:00 AM (GMT -6) | | I'm thinking about "supra-temporal eternality."
Basically, the Triune God sans creation would experience temporality through PERICHORETIC INTERPERSONAL INTERACTION (For Christians, the ultimate reality is PERSONAL, right?) that would be akin to "dynamic equilibrium" where there is constant movement (and sequence) while there is a steady state.
In other words, time doesn't constraint God (just like the ideas of kenosis, interiority, and exteriority don't bind God). Time is WITHIN God (like the ideas of kenosis, interiority, and exteriority )...BECAUSE of his being perichoretic interpersonal interaction.
It seems to work with presentism AND a view of interpersonality between creation and the creator.
This works for me....but maybe I'm not seeing everything...
I. D. G. A. F.
Christ is All.
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One Love
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| Posted 12/24/2009 9:10 AM (GMT -6) | | I think that the EO just want to assume God's transcendence from everything creaturely, just on principle. I grant the intention, but I'd just ask the question:
Is perichoretic interpersonal interaction POSSIBLE without any sequence or "movement" at all?
THAT'S what I want them to answer.
I can see some monistic, impersonal idea of Deity fitting atemporality...but not a concept where Divine Persons are constantly moving "out of themselves" and "into others"
I. D. G. A. F.
Christ is All.
"God resists the proud, and give His grace to the humble." Post Edited (One Love) : 12/24/2009 8:14:39 AM (GMT-6) | | Back to Top | | |
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One Love
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| Posted 12/24/2009 9:15 AM (GMT -6) | | Oh, I get it. The whole "God HAS to experience everything he CAN experience and do so in simultaneity" thing, right?
I. D. G. A. F.
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One Love
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| Posted 12/24/2009 9:19 AM (GMT -6) | | Tom:
It's God's KIND OF LIFE that makes him immune to the ravages of time. But that's not suprqtemporal. It's very temporal. One has to be VERY-temporal for to escape the ravages of time the way God does. He's the MOST temporal being there is.
"Most temporal" doesn't mean "super-temporal"? I thought it could reference that idea...
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One Love
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| Posted 12/24/2009 9:21 AM (GMT -6) | | AND...I really see the "dynamic equilibrium" idea as being helpful to how God can be the GROUND of temporality...while experiencing "no change."
Feel me?
 
I. D. G. A. F.
Christ is All.
"God resists the proud, and give His grace to the humble." Post Edited (One Love) : 12/24/2009 8:25:07 AM (GMT-6) | | Back to Top | | |
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One Love
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| Posted 12/24/2009 9:26 AM (GMT -6) | | Perichoresis has been used historically to describe God's relationship to the world, as a way of expressing the immanence and transcendence of God. It is true, on the one hand, that God is contained by nothing, and is instead the One in whom we live and move and have our being — i.e., everything is contained by Him. Yet at the same time God is within all things, "omnipresent." As Hilary of Poitiers put it, God is both "without" and "within" all things.
This mutual indwelling and containment is a created extension of the mutual indwelling and containment of the Triune Persons. The Father is in the Son, and in the Son are "precontained" all created things (so Cusa, and many others, including Bavinck); so, the Father is "in" all things. Likewise the Son, as the One in whom are all things, is in the Father, so that all things are in the Father. And all things are within and without the Father and the Son because the Father and Son indwell one another by the Spirit.
This raises the question of whether a unitarian God can be omnipresent, without becoming a pantheistic deity. If there is no uncreated "space" for the unitarian god to indwell, then he begins to indwell, realizes his potential for indwelling, when he makes a world (but can a unitarian god create? I think not, but that'll be a point for another post). Each person of the Triune God, however, has always forever indwelled "alien" "space," the alien space of the other persons. Each person has a home outside Himself, and God as the One God has a home within Himself, and there is nothing essentially new when He begins to indwell a created world.
posted by Peter J. Leithart
JUST LIKE there is "nothing essentially new" when we see Jesus' SELF-GIVING on the Cross.
I. D. G. A. F.
Christ is All.
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One Love
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| Posted 12/24/2009 9:28 AM (GMT -6) | | Tom:
Yeah, I wouldn't want to say time is something outside of God and preceding God that he fits into (like we do essentially be coming into being and passing out of being). Time is, as I see it, a consequent feature of God's triune existence. Time is HOW God is God.
Yup.
I. D. G. A. F.
Christ is All.
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PotOnWheel
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| Posted 12/24/2009 9:30 AM (GMT -6) | | | | |
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One Love
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| Posted 12/24/2009 9:34 AM (GMT -6) | | Is the the One God (Father) conceivable without God's Son?
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One Love
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| Posted 12/24/2009 9:37 AM (GMT -6) | | How about this, Tom?
" 'God's Time' (and not time-as-march-to-entropy) can only be experienced PERSONALLY in communion with God."
I. D. G. A. F.
Christ is All.
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One Love
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| Posted 12/24/2009 9:39 AM (GMT -6) | | Bruce:
does what he sees the father do (without time inbetween, as a fountain of the father's will, in union with the father in the spirit)
Jesus' will IS the Father's will...which would make sense. The Son "empties" himself to be "filled" with the Father's Presence and Will...JUST LIKE...we are to empty our selves and be filled with Christ's Presence and Will (whose is the Father's Will! )
Kenosis/plerosis
http://fatherstephen.wordpress.com/2008/06/09/the-emptiness-of-christ/
The Emptiness of ChristBy fatherstephen
St. Paul speaks of Christ “emptying” Himself in His voluntary sacrifice for us all (Philippians 2:5-11). It is the only place in the New Testament that speaks of this particular action of Christ – at least as an “emptying” (kenosis) but the concept has always played a large role in the Church’s understanding of Christ’s death on the Cross.
It is interesting to me that Father Sophrony, in his writings, takes this idea of kenosis and applies it as well to the “not-I-but-the-Father” sayings: “I live by the Father” (Jn. 6:57; cf 5:30, 7:18, 15:15).
Fr. Nicholas Sakharov says of Father Sophrony’s point:
Christ, though the incarnate God, avoids any “divine action” of his own, so much so that the Father’s hypostasis [Person] is manifest absolutely through the absolutely “transparent screen” of Christ’s self-emptied hypostasis. Through this kenosis it becomes the “express image of the Father” (Heb. 1:3).
This, it seems to me, says much to us about what it means to become “like Christ.” The moralist approach (which I was taught as a child) is fraught with constant attention to “what would Jesus do?” in a moral calculation that can never end in anything but failure or delusion.
When St. Paul speaks of conformity to the image of Christ it is always clear that this is not something we accomplish, but something that is accomplished within us by God. In particular he says:
I am crucified with Christ, nevertheless I live, yet not I, but Christ liveth in me. And the life that I now live in the flesh I live by the faith of the Son of God who loved me and gave Himself for me (Gal. 2:20).
Here is our own kenosis or emptying. “Not-I-but-Christ.” And thus we become transparent and finally transparent such that we are His image. This is not an effort of moralism, but a self-offering to God. And so St. Paul writes:
I appeal to you therefore, brethren, by the mercies of God, to present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is your spiritual worship. Do not be conformed to this world but be transformed by the renewal of your mind, that you may prove what is the will of God, what is good and acceptable and perfect (Romans 12:1-2).
I. D. G. A. F.
Christ is All.
"God resists the proud, and give His grace to the humble." Post Edited (One Love) : 12/24/2009 8:42:18 AM (GMT-6) | | Back to Top | | |
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One Love
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| Posted 12/24/2009 9:43 AM (GMT -6) | | The Father always has "another home" or "alien space" to indwell: the Son.
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One Love
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| Posted 12/24/2009 9:45 AM (GMT -6) | | The rate of "kenotic love" that the Father gives to the Son is the SAME RATE as the "kenotic love" that the Son gives back to the Father.
Dynamic Equilibrium.
I. D. G. A. F.
Christ is All.
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One Love
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| Posted 12/24/2009 10:15 AM (GMT -6) | | 
I. D. G. A. F.
Christ is All.
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